Powering the ‘Developmental State’

Limited progress with industrialization during the 2000s led the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) to launch the two five-year Growth and Transformation Plans that consolidated what the government described as its ‘developmental state’ strategy focused on maintaining rapid growth rates and finally achieving the structural transformation of the economy. This chapter examines this upsurge in ambition and, in doing so, highlights a central contradiction in the EPRDF’s ‘developmental state’ project. This is that, unlike the East Asian states on which the government modelled itself, Ethiopia struggled to build and empower the technical and bureaucratic expertise required to deliver on the political elite’s developmental ambitions. The result in the electricity sector was that political pressure for ever-more rapid progress combined with reliance on foreign contractors to bypass technical input, resulting in a series of increasingly risky and inefficient projects.